This week’s readings are united by two things. On one hand, they recognize that the films under discussion reject Classical Hollywood cinema and the familiar formulae of cinematic realism. On the other hand, the readings all try to supply an account that helps viewers make sense of the (sometimes) senseless—or at least radically different—priorities of the films and their directors.

I’ll begin with Sitney’s Visionary Film (1979) because I think it may help bring some order to this motley collection of films and videos. Sitney identifies the structural film as an important development in American avant-garde cinema (369). In his view, structural film, which “insists on its shape” (369) rather than content, has four key characteristics:

1. “fixed camera position”;
2. “the flicker effects”;
3. “loop printing”; and
4. “rephotography off the screen.” (369-70)

But instead of investigating these characteristics in detail, Sitney turns to Andy Warhol as the most important precursor of structural film. In Sitney’s account, Warhol demolished a whole series of film-making myths about, inter alia, narrative, duration, attention, and directorial agency (371). Among other strategies, Warhol “simply turned the camera on and walked away” (371-72). He made films of “normal” length in which very little happens. He also made very, very long films in which literally nothing happens. Sitney calls this Warhol’s “temporal gift”: “duration” (374). In a more philosophical register, Warhol—cast in the role of mindfulness meditation guide—forced the viewer to attend to attention, which may “trigge[r] ontological awareness” (374). Both duration and “ontological awareness” on the viewer’s part are antithetical to traditional cinematic norms, where the goal is typically immersion in the world on the screen rather than a reflection on the conditions of viewing itself.

Thiher’s (1977) essay on Un Chien Andalou situates the film in relation to the codes of silent cinema. According to Thiher, silent film’s syntactical developments were largely aimed at rivaling the realist novel from a narrative perspective (38). Surrealists like Buñuel and Dalí rejected this “bourgeois ideology of realistic mimesis” (39) and developed a whole range of alternative strategies around the axiom of “ludic activity . . . that attempts systematically to subvert the rules of the game” (39), including:

1. Attacking spectatorial passivity (this is how Thiher interprets the famous gesture of slicing the eyeball) (39);
2. Rejecting linear chronology (39-40);
3. Disturbing the causality implied in “conventional filmic syntax” (40);
4. Employing black humor “to abolish the distinction . . . between the repressive working of the reality principle and the pleasure principle” (42);
5. Rejecting meaning in narrative (even if there is still “sense”) (42); and
6. Substituting mimetic logic with (Freudian) dream logic (but ultimately asserting that “film can be a mimetic means for representing the world of repressed desire”). (46)

In Thiher’s estimation, Un Chien Andalou amounts to a critical intervention within film—one that subjects it “to the same kind of self-criticism and ironic subversion that the modernist notion of self-consciousness had already subjected literature and painting” (48).

In her essay on the Akerman-chamber/-bedroom, Ivone Margulies (2007) does two helpful things. First, she orients us to the milieu of feminist cinema in the 1970s, and she situates Ackerman’s work in the broader context of video art, a related medium that we might do well to investigate alongside our videos for this week. In terms of the working principles of Akerman’s cinema, Margulies identifies the following strands:

1. Focus on everydayness;
2. Centrality of social reproduction (i.e., domestic labor, care work);
3. Anti-psychological orientation that blocks the representation of interiority (this works as a double rejection of Classical Hollywood and of the distortion of women’s subjectivity in Freudian accounts);
4. Spatial relationality (Akerman’s rooms are simultaneously agoraphobic and in dialogue with the outside world);
5. Hyperattentiveness to mise en scène and the tableau;
6. Performativity over interiority or self-exposure (in terms of Akerman’s own presence in the films).

In the course of situating Akerman’s preoccupation with small domestic spaces, Margulies mentions two video artists working around the same time: Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci. Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” is a send-up of cooking instruction videos, in that nothing is cooked. Instead, Rosler creatively repurposes kitchen utensils to stage an aggressive performance that rejects the idea that women’s place is in the kitchen. Acconci’s creepy, compulsively watchable 1973 video “Theme Song” is probably the better video to put in conversation with Akerman’s (rather than the one Margulies discusses). In both Acconci and Akerman, we find the artist reclining in a domestic space, addressing the viewer, although the similarities end there. I bring up the work of these two video artists because, although it started much later than experimental film (the Portapak video recorder wasn’t widely available until 1967-68), video art developed parallel critiques of conventional cinema and television, such that it may make sense to consider the two media and their critical discourses together.

Questions:

1. Is it still correct that “the precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness”? Do “they operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other”? (Sitney 1979, viii)
2. Should we consider experimental film and video art together?
3. From an auteurist perspective (or not), how do we think about directors, like Greenaway, who make highly experimental work, but who also make avant-garde films (“The Pillow Book,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover”) and somewhat (somewhat!) more conventional Hollywood films (“Eisenstein in Guanajuato”)?
4. I’m not sure how others feel, but I break out in a sweat every time I watch “This Is America,” but I keep going back to it. I’ve been trying to think about the video in terms of Black cultural production and what it means for the video to be directed by a non-Black person. (Could 12 Years a Slave have been directed by a non-Black person? How would that have changed its conditions of reception? The viewer’s interpretation of the spectacles of Black suffering depicted in that film?) I’m wondering whether the fact of Murai’s non-Blackness affects the formal and aesthetic choices made in the video. I’m not sure how one would go about answering that question, except by comparing it to music videos made by Black video- and filmmakers self-consciously working in that tradition, like Arthur Jafa (Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky”) and Kahlil Joseph (Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes”).

***

Bibliography

Margulies, Ivone. “La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator.” Rouge 10 (2007). http://www.rouge.com.au/10/akerman.html.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. 2^nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Thiher, Allen. “Surrealism’s Enduring Bite: ‘Un Chien Andalou.’” Literature/Film Quarterly 5, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 38-49.

Film Materials

I want to focus our attention to two sequences from Eisenstein’s October. The first is the “montage of the gods” (29:30-34:30); the second is the “Fraternizing” sequence (42:00-43:20).

The montage of the gods occurs right after a moment of rising tension in the film. We’ve just learned that Kerensky has reinstated the death penalty, and General Kornilov is advancing toward Petrograd. As the intertitle puts it, “the revolution is in danger,” punctuated by a loud steam whistle sounding the alarm. Then, the intertitles read: “Defend Petrograd! . . . In the name of God and Country. . . . In the name of God . . . .” The montage shows, among other things, Eastern Orthodox Jesus, a Tibetan deity, the Buddha, a Chinese dragon, “primitive” carvings or totems, and much more. Around 32:30, the previously shown images of the statue of Tsar Alexander III are run in reverse, essentially restoring him to the throne, alongside the ironic intertitle, “Horray!”

I’m interested in the role of religious icons and sculptures—objects—as images in the montage. As I discuss in more detail below, Benjamin argues that the modern era is characterized by mode of perception that he calls “the decay of the aura,” in which the mechanical reproduction of art works liquidates them of their traditional value and function. Benjamin also claims that authentic works of art find their basis in ritual, magic, cult, and religion. Technological reproducibility severs the work of art from authenticity, which allows the art work to take on new roles—importantly, art as exhibition, which for Benjamin is linked to politics and indeed to film.

In this vein, I have a series of questions about the religious objects and images in the montage of the gods:

1. Are the religious icons/objects auratic?
2. Does October strip them of their aura, whatever that might mean? Does the film therefore also sever them from the various traditions and cultures that structure their reception and authenticity? If so, what are the stakes?
3. What other roles might the religious images play in October? Are they a purely formal aspect of the montage device? (The state did accuse Eisenstein of being overly formalist and confusing the workers, after all.) Do they function as Benjamin thinks film art might, as exhibition and political propaganda?

The second scene depicts the fraternization of Russian and German troops after a peace treaty. The bulk of the montage is devoted to folk dance, some in medium-length shots where entire dancers can be seen, but much of it is close-ups on particular dancing body parts—feet, hands, and heads. The montage also includes shots of soldiers’ faces, which reveal that they are indeed fraternizing, enjoying the festivities.

I found this sequence notable for a number of reasons: it’s quasi-ethnographic; it aggressively employs montage in an almost fetishistic way to focus on parts of the dancers; and it sticks out as one of the more extra-diegetic parts of the film. Although it announces that a peace treaty has been signed, there’s no particular reason why the extended dancing sequences are necessary to the film’s narrative. In short, the Fraternizing montage is excessive, but also revealing of what Benjamin calls “the optical unconscious” (37), the way in which “the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object” (37).

I don’t have particular questions for this section; I simply offer it up for contemplation in light of Benjamin’s conviction (not all that different from Vertov’s more aggressively argued Kino-eye) that we must account for the new “equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (37, emphasis removed).

Benjamin’s “The Work of Art”

As Prof. O’Sullivan mentioned when we first met, entire courses can be (and are) structured around an explication of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” or “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” if you want to be fussy about it. Given the enormous weight of the essay’s reception, I’m excited to share my thoughts with you, but also mindful of Benjamin’s difficulties and resistance to interpretation.

I’d like to offer one brief introductory comment to orient my summary. Benjamin is working in the tradition of Marxist aesthetics—a discourse that even sympathetic readers find it difficult to enter into. For purposes of our discussion, I suggest that we set Marxism to the side. Instead, we would do well to remember that “The Work of Art” is in conversation with contemporary debates in art history, especially with Alois Riegl’s theory of Kunstwollen, which is “the manner in which a specific culture seeks to give form, color, and line to its art.” For Riegl, “Works of art . . . are thus the clearest source of a very particular kind of historical information. They encode not just the character of the artistic production of the age, but the character of parallel features of the society: its religion, philosophy, ethical structure, and institutions” (Jennings 2008, 10). Put differently, art works are not autonomous; they are produced by humans embedded in societies. Thus, the interpretation of art yields information about the society that produced the art, and vice-versa. In my view, this is all the “Marxism” we need in order to understand Benjamin’s desire to “defin[e] the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production” (Benjamin 2008, 19; 666).

Authenticity, Tradition, Temporality, Mass Reproduction

For Benjamin, authenticity is a key criterion of the artwork. Authenticity is connected to a tradition. A tradition means that an artwork was created at a particular time and place—of which it bears traces—and passed down to the present unadulterated, unchanged. Thus Seurat paints A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from 1884-86, it’s exhibited in Paris alongside other Impressionist work, the Art Institute of Chicago acquires it in 1924, and this very moment you can see A Sunday Afternoon in the Windy City. You stand before it, witness to a tradition. The painting is substantially as it was in 1886; it is authentic, and so is your experience of it. For Benjamin, it is impossible to have this kind of experience standing before a photograph or video installation. “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction” (21, emphasis removed). Why? Because technological (or mechanical) reproduction both distorts the original (by manipulating it, blowing it up, reducing it, etc.) and rips the artwork from its time and place of origin, and in doing so interrupts its “physical duration,” so key to Benjamin’s understanding of tradition (22). What is at stake is nothing less than the artwork’s “authority,” as no one can testify to the authenticity of a work that, having been mechanically duplicated, can now pop in and out of historical time. In Benjamin’s formula, “the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique experience” (22, emphasis removed). Mechanical reproduction culminates in film, the agent of “the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage” (22).

Mode of Perception, Aura, Art’s Value

In the Marxist view of the world, there are various modes of production—asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist, socialist, and so on—each of which corresponds to a particular way of production and social relations. Under contemporary capitalism, for example, we expect the production of goods and ideas on a global scale via integrated markets backed by states, contracts, private property, and so on. Feudalism, on the other hand, features a different cast of characters: lords and serfs, nobility and theocracy, the predominance of craft production, and so on. Each historical period is characterized by some mode (or mix of modes) of production.

In the same way, Benjamin argues, “just as the entire mode of existence of human collectivities changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception” (23, emphasis removed). This is Riegl’s Kunstwollen. Riegl, however, was working on late-antique Roman art; Benjamin wants to bring us to the present. He boldly claims that “the medium of present-day perception can be understood as a decay of the aura” (23). Benjamin defines the aura as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” (23). The aura is a kind of action at a distance, where an object reaches out and touches the observer’s soul. Another way to think about it is, an object’s aura is its objecthood asserting itself. I recognize that these definitions are hopelessly vague, but so is Benjamin on this count. I’ll try one more definition: The aura is all the aspects of the experience of a piece of art that are lost if experience is reduced to pure looking by, say, the flattening out an object to a photographic print. The best personal example I can give is Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, which are on display at Dia Beacon in upstate New York. They have a hieratic quality that’s hard to put into words. Given Benjamin’s hypothesis about the connection between ritual and aura (24-5), perhaps my reaction to the Ellipses isn’t so surprising.

Benjamin associates the decay of aura with the desire of the masses to get as close to the artwork as possible, preferably in the form of a mechanical reproduction (23). The masses, in short, desire the destruction of uniqueness in favor of sameness, which results in a loss of authenticity. In Benjamin’s estimation, “as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics” (25, emphasis removed). Or a “politics of art,” anyway (20). Liberated from ritual, raised to its highest form in film, film art’s function or role as “exhibition value” (25) “is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (26, emphasis removed).

References

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Michael W. Jennings, “The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 9-18.